Negros Occidental • April 2026. Negros 19: Massacre or Legitimate Encounter in Toboso? negros 19 toboso, lyle prijoles filipino american, alyssa alano up diliman, rj ledesma altermidya, bayan usa, lfs sfsu, fil-am activist killed, philippine insurgency 2026, red-tagging, npa clash.

Negros Occidental • April 2026

Negros 19: Massacre or Legitimate Encounter in Toboso?

A 40-year-old Filipino American from California was among 19 people killed in a 12-hour firefight in Negros Occidental on April 19, 2026. The Armed Forces of the Philippines calls it a lawful encounter. BAYAN USA and rights groups call it a massacre. Here is what is verified, what is contested, and why this one should matter to every Fil-Am household.

Northern Negros Occidental, where the 12-hour firefight in Sitio Sinugmawan, Barangay Salamanca, Toboso, left 19 people dead on April 19, 2026.

The first shots were fired at 3:58 AM. By the time the sun rose over the sugar fields of Barangay Salamanca in Toboso, northern Negros Occidental, a running firefight was underway that would last twelve hours, displace 653 people from their homes, and leave nineteen bodies on the ground across two neighboring sitios — Sinugmawan, where it began, and Plariding, three kilometers away, where it ended.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines called it a tactical victory. Brigadier General Ted Dumosmog of the 303rd Infantry Brigade said his soldiers had dismantled the leadership of the Northern Negros Front of the New People’s Army — the single largest rebel casualty count in Negros since the 1990s. Rights groups, student organizations, journalists, the Commission on Human Rights, and the NPA itself called it something else. And on April 24, BAYAN USA — the U.S.-based federation of Filipino American organizations — added a name to the list of the dead that reframes this story for every Fil-Am reading it: Lyle Prijoles. Forty years old. From California. A founding member of Anakbayan-USA. One of us.

📌 Did You Know? Three of the people publicly identified among the Negros 19 share a common thread — the League of Filipino Students (LFS), a 48-year-old youth organization with chapters in Manila, Bacolod, and one chapter in the United States: at San Francisco State University. Alyssa Alano was LFS-UP Diliman Chairperson 2024–2025. RJ Nichole Ledesma was LFS-Bacolod Chairperson in 2020. Lyle Prijoles, according to Anakbayan chapter archives, was an LFS-SFSU member and Solidarity Officer of the founding National Executive Committee of Anakbayan-USA, elected in Chicago in May 2012. The Toboso firefight killed three generations of the same student network on the same morning.

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🇵🇭 Tagalog Word of the Day Pakikipamuhay — pah-kee-kee-pah-MOO-high
Literally, “living with.” It is the practice of immersing oneself in another community — usually a poor or marginalized one — to understand their conditions firsthand, rather than from a distance. Central to Filipino student activism, progressive journalism, and community organizing for more than fifty years. Alyssa Alano, RJ Nichole Ledesma, and Lyle Prijoles were all reportedly doing pakikipamuhay in Negros when they were killed.

The Filipino American Among the Dead

Lyle Prijoles did not fit the usual profile of someone killed in a rural Philippine firefight, which is precisely what makes his death the story PinoyBuilt has to tell.

According to a statement issued by BAYAN USA on April 23, Prijoles was forty years old, a human rights advocate from California, and a longtime fixture of Bay Area Filipino American community life. His parents owned a Filipino restaurant. He studied Journalism and Asian American Studies. He had been involved with student clubs, arts and cultural organizations, and rights advocacy groups for, in BAYAN USA’s words, decades. He had traveled to the Philippines several times as an adult to learn directly from communities facing poverty, disaster, and state repression. This spring, he went again.

The paper trail that backs up BAYAN USA’s statement is short but precise. The public records of the Anakbayan-USA founding congress, held in Chicago during the May 2012 NATO summit protests, list Lyle Prijoles of the League of Filipino Students–San Francisco State University as the elected Solidarity Officer of the organization’s first National Executive Committee. Anakbayan chapters from Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, New Jersey, San Diego, East Bay Oakland, Silicon Valley, and Chicago sent delegates. LFS-SFSU — the only U.S. chapter of the League of Filipino Students — was there too. Prijoles represented the student wing of the federation that, on April 23 of this year, publicly demanded justice for his killing.

LFS-SFSU was founded in 1997 in the San Francisco Bay Area and based at San Francisco State University the following year. It is housed within the School of Asian American Studies — the country’s first and still its largest — and its advisors have included Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, one of the most prominent Filipino American educators in U.S. academia. The chapter is an affiliate of BAYAN-USA, the same international chapter of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan that issued Prijoles’s obituary on April 23. The Bay Area thread is tight: SFSU, LFS, Anakbayan-USA, BAYAN USA, and Prijoles himself.

BAYAN USA’s account of why Prijoles was in Negros is unambiguous. He was, the statement says, living with farming communities to learn firsthand their daily hardships and experiences under state repression — the same pakikipamuhay work that Alyssa Alano, RJ Nichole Ledesma, and generations of LFS members before them have done. BAYAN USA also made a plainer argument, directed at every Filipino American reading: no Filipino overseas who wants to return home and stand with the most marginalized in society, they said, should have to fear government attack for doing so.

“Lyle’s care for others, for his community, and for human rights in the Philippines motivated him to go back home to the Philippines. It is a decision that has our highest respect.”

— BAYAN USA, April 23, 2026

What Happened in Toboso

The facts that both sides agree on are narrow. They are worth laying out before the rest.

• 3:58 AM, April 19: Philippine Army troops from the 79th Infantry “Masaligan” Battalion, operating under the 303rd Infantry Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, engage an armed group in Sitio Sinugmawan, Barangay Salamanca, Toboso. The military says the encounter began based on verified civilian reports of armed elements in the area.
• Morning into afternoon: Running gun battles spread across the barangay and into Sitio Plariding, roughly three kilometers away. Residents of Barangays Salamanca and San Jose evacuate. Schools in Salamanca, Toril, and Labi-Labi are opened as evacuation centers.
• Around 3:00 PM: The fighting ends. Nineteen people are dead. One government soldier is wounded — initial reports said a minor hand injury; later reports described gunshot wounds to both arms treated at a Bacolod City hospital.
• April 20: The Philippine Army announces the operation. Col. Louie Dema-ala, Army spokesperson, says the Northern Negros Front has been dismantled. Army Chief Lt. Gen. Antonio Nafarrete describes the dead as “victims of lies and deception.”
• April 21: Brig. Gen. Ted Dumosmog confirms that rebel commander Roger Fabillar — alias Jhong, Arnel Tapang, Nono, and Domeng — is among the dead. A P2-million bounty had been on Fabillar for alleged involvement in the killings of civilians in Calatrava and Toboso.
• April 22: The UP Diliman University Student Council confirms that one of its councilors, Alyssa Alano, is among the dead. Altermidya confirms the death of its Negros Island Region coordinator, RJ Nichole Ledesma. SunStar Cebu identifies teacher Maria Clarita Blanco of Tabogon. The Commission on Human Rights Negros Island Region office opens an investigation.
• April 23: The Apolinario Gatmaitan Command of the NPA, through spokesperson Ka Maoche Legislador, issues its own statement: the squad was led by Fabillar, but most of the dead were civilians and rights advocates, not combatants. BAYAN USA issues its first statement naming Alano and Ledesma.
• April 23: The PNP Negros Island Region releases the names of six of the 19 dead, identified through forensic examination and family claims.
• April 24: BAYAN USA issues a second statement naming Lyle Prijoles, a Filipino American from California, as another of the dead. Malaya Movement USA adds the name Errol Wendel.

Where the two sides diverge is on the question of who, exactly, was fighting.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines is categorical: nineteen New People’s Army members were killed, twenty-four firearms were recovered from the scene — seven M16 rifles, three Garand rifles, three M14 rifles, a carbine, an M203 grenade launcher, six .45-caliber pistols, and three .357 revolvers — and the operation was conducted in accordance with established rules of engagement. Col. Dema-ala, responding to social media claims that the dead included journalists, researchers, and student leaders, asked a question the military has repeated in every statement since: why were these people at an active firefight site? He argued that human rights violations, if any, deserve examination through legal and institutional processes rather than trial by social media.

The NPA, through its Apolinario Gatmaitan Command, offered a startlingly narrow counter-claim. Yes, there was an NPA squad in Toboso that morning. Yes, it was led by Roger Fabillar. But the squad was small. Most of the nineteen dead, they said, were civilians documenting a peasant activity — standing with farmers being pushed to the margins by landgrabbing and systemic neglect. They described the military’s tally of 19 combatants with 19 firearms as a study in calculated exaggeration and pointed to what they called a well-documented history of planted evidence in past Negros encounters.

Human Rights Advocates Negros added a specific claim that, if it holds up, is consequential: Ledesma, they said, was not at the initial firefight in Sitio Sinugmawan. He was killed in a separate peasant community in Sitio Plariding during a pursuit operation. The UP Diliman USC made a parallel claim about Alano, describing the incident not as an encounter at all but as troops firing on a community. Karapatan, on behalf of the family of farmer Roel (also spelled Ruel) Sabillo, 19, said he had been working on his uncle’s farm the day before the clash and was not a rebel.

Eight of the nineteen remain unidentified as of April 24.

The Others Who Were Killed

Eleven of the nineteen have been publicly named. Their biographies, read together, tell their own story about who was in Toboso that morning.

The Identified Civilians and Activists

Alyssa Alano was the Education and Research Councilor of the UP Diliman University Student Council for the 2025–2026 academic year, and had served as Chairperson of LFS-UP Diliman the year before. The USC said she had been living among farmers in Negros to study conditions of land grabbing and militarization. Her colleagues described her as an “innocent civilian” and what her fellow students call an Iskolar ng Bayan — a scholar of the nation, a term that carries a century of meaning in Philippine student life.

RJ Nichole Ledesma was 30 years old. He led Paghimutad-Negros, an alternative media outfit focused on human rights reporting and grassroots storytelling, from 2020. He served as Altermidya Network’s regional coordinator for Negros Island. He was the 2022 Kabataan Partylist’s 7th nominee. In 2020, he was Chairperson of LFS-Bacolod. Malaya Movement USA, in its April 23 statement, said Ledesma had met U.S.-based Filipino American delegations on immersion trips in 2024 and 2025 and had described Negros in his own words to them as a microcosm of Philippine society — its rich land, the layers of haciendas and corporations that plundered it, the resilience of its people.

Maureen Keil Santuyo was a teacher from the University of the Philippines Manila. Maria Clarita Branzuel Blanco was a teacher from Tabogon, Cebu — the reason SunStar Cebu led the story in the Visayan press. Errol Wendel has been named by Malaya Movement USA and BAYAN USA but has not yet appeared in mainstream Philippine wire coverage. Lyle Prijoles, as detailed above, was the Filipino American from California.

The Identified Farmers and the Commander

The PNP Negros Island Region’s Special Investigation Task Group Toboso has released six names through forensic examination and family claims:

• Roger Fabillar Tapang, 36, of Sitio Malig-on, Barangay Bandila, Toboso. Aliases Jhong, Arnel, Nono, and Domeng. The NPA commander. Both sides agree he was armed and fighting.
• Rene Villarin Sr., 58, alias “Kumader Pikot,” of Sitio Huwebisan, Barangay Marcelo, Calatrava.
• Ruel Sabillo (identified as “Roel” by Karapatan), 19, of Sitio Singiton, Barangay Tabun-ak, Toboso. His family told Karapatan he was a farmer working at his uncle’s business.
• Sonny Boy Manayon Caramihan, 28, of Sitio Batbataw, Barangay Bagonbon, San Carlos City.
• Pedro Agustin Bonghanoy, 32, of Barangay Libertad, Escalante City.
• Arnel Mahilum Javoc, 32, of Sitio Labay-ao, Barangay Lalong, Calatrava.

Regional outlet Bombo Radyo Cebu has added one more name to the list — Alejandro Montoya — bringing public identifications to eleven.

Pakikipamuhay: When Immersion Became Dangerous

To understand why so many non-combatants may have been in Toboso on the morning of April 19, a reader outside the Philippines needs to understand pakikipamuhay — and why, for half a century, it has not been a dangerous word.

Translated literally, pakikipamuhay means “living with.” It is the Filipino name for what North American academics would call ethnography or solidarity practice: a student, a journalist, or an organizer spends days, weeks, or months inside a community — usually a rural one, a poor one, an indigenous one — and learns its conditions by sharing them. Scholarship becomes lived. Reporting becomes embedded. Organizing becomes relational. The League of Filipino Students, founded in 1977 against Martial Law tuition hikes, has made pakikipamuhay a pillar of its membership formation for almost fifty years. Its Manila and Bacolod chapters run immersion programs every semester. Its one U.S. chapter at SFSU runs an annual trip called Baliksambayanan — “return to the motherland” — that has taken Bay Area Fil-Am students into Filipino communities since the late 1990s.

The practice is not fringe. Philippine universities — public and private, Catholic and secular — build it into their curricula. Major Philippine dailies assign reporters to live in affected areas after typhoons. Bishops do it for their pastoral letters. The question the AFP’s Col. Dema-ala has asked — why were they there? — has a fifty-year answer: they were doing the work their teachers taught them to do.

What has changed is the state’s willingness to accept that answer.

Ernesto Torres Jr., undersecretary of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), offered the government’s new framing in the days after Toboso. He described the recruitment of young Filipinos into rural immersion activity as what he called “terror-grooming” — a systematic process, in his telling, of indoctrinating the youth and vulnerable under the cover of peasant solidarity. The rhetorical shift is subtle but total. Where a generation ago an LFS chapter immersion was a university-sanctioned activity, it is now, in the NTF-ELCAC’s language, the front end of an armed recruitment pipeline. The dead in Toboso are not casualties of a botched operation; they are, per the undersecretary, sacrificed by a collapsing terrorist movement that continues to feed on lies and deception.

The term for this rhetorical maneuver, inside and outside the Philippines, is red-tagging — the public labeling of individuals or organizations as communist fronts, typically without due process, often in ways that precede lethal force. The Philippine Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that red-tagging threatens a person’s right to life, liberty, and security. The NTF-ELCAC has been the institutional locus of the practice since its creation by executive order in 2018. Paghimutad-Negros — RJ Ledesma’s media outfit — was red-tagged as early as October 2022, when the 303rd Infantry Brigade’s own Facebook page labeled one of its reports as propaganda linked to the National Democratic Front.

Context — What is “red-tagging”?

Red-tagging is the practice of publicly branding individuals or organizations as communist rebels or fronts, typically by state officials or state-linked outlets, without the safeguards of formal legal proceedings. In the Philippines, the Supreme Court has affirmed that red-tagging threatens a person’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and security. Internationally, it has been condemned by the United Nations and by human rights bodies as a practice that frequently precedes extrajudicial killings and is incompatible with International Humanitarian Law. Paghimutad-Negros, Altermidya, and the League of Filipino Students have all been publicly red-tagged at various points by Philippine state agencies or state-linked social media accounts.

The Shadow of Negros

This is not the first time Negros has killed its documenters.

In October 2018, nine sugarcane farmers from the National Federation of Sugar Workers were shot dead in Sagay City as they camped on disputed land they had been tilling. The military and police at first blamed the NPA; a congressional inquiry and an independent fact-finding mission contradicted that account. The Sagay 9, as the dead came to be known, entered the long ledger of Negros killings without anyone ever being convicted for them. One month after Sagay, then-President Rodrigo Duterte signed Memorandum Order 32, declaring a “state of lawless violence” in Negros, Samar, and Bicol and deploying additional troops. Rights groups argue that the order deepened the violence rather than curbing it.

In March 2019, fourteen people were killed in simultaneous police raids across Negros Oriental. The dead were leftist activists and farmers; the warrants were boilerplate; the pattern was familiar. The Negros 14 also drew condemnation from Karapatan and international rights bodies. No convictions followed.

In November 2022, peace consultant Ericson Acosta and his companion Joseph Jimenez were killed in Kabankalan City. The military said they had died in an encounter. Forensic examination revealed stab wounds, and human rights groups argued they had been captured and executed. Acosta was a known figure — a poet, a political detainee under the Arroyo administration, a peace negotiator. His death, too, became shorthand for what rights advocates call the Negros pattern: a killing, a state “encounter” explanation, and a long, unresolved aftermath.

Between 2022 and 2025, according to figures compiled by BAYAN USA from Karapatan’s documentation, 52 of the 135 victims of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines were from Negros. The island produces, by the Department of Agriculture’s own figures, the overwhelming majority of the country’s sugar — a single-crop economy overlaid on the most unequal land-ownership structure in the nation. Activists have called Negros the “Social Volcano” for generations. The name is not poetic. It describes a functioning theory of conflict: so long as the land question remains unresolved, the island will keep producing both sugar and insurgency, and the state will keep meeting the latter with force.

The Toboso 19 are not an interruption to that pattern. They are the latest verse of it.

The Diaspora Responds

By Wednesday, April 22 — seventy-two hours after the firefight ended — BAYAN USA had issued its first statement, on its public blog, naming Alano and Ledesma. By Friday, April 24, Malaya Movement USA had followed with a statement of its own, naming Wendel alongside them. That same day, BAYAN USA issued the statement that brought this story to the Bay Area: Lyle Prijoles, one of ours, was among the dead.

The diaspora infrastructure for this kind of response has been in place for decades. BAYAN USA has chapters or affiliated organizations in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, New Jersey, East Bay Oakland, and Silicon Valley. Malaya Movement USA operates in parallel along the same coastal corridors. The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP), which has condemned the Toboso operation and is monitoring for further violations of International Humanitarian Law, maintains its three most active chapters in exactly the places Lyle Prijoles called home — San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. These are the organizations that send delegations on the immersion trips that Ledesma hosted in Negros in 2024 and 2025. These are the organizations whose members Lyle Prijoles helped build fourteen years ago in Chicago.

For Filipino Americans whose politics are different — who are not members of these organizations, who find the language of fascism or imperialism in BAYAN USA statements difficult — the question posed by the Toboso killings cannot be answered along partisan lines. The unresolved question, after all the rhetoric from both the left and the military is set aside, is a prior one. What does the Philippine state do when a 40-year-old Filipino American returns home, on his own passport, under his own initiative, to spend time with farmers and report what he sees? What does it do with a 30-year-old journalist running a small outfit out of Bacolod, or a UP student who goes to live with tenant farmers between semesters? If the answer in 2026 is that such people are “terror-groomed” and may, in the course of a dawn operation, end up among the neutralized, then Fil-Am families who send their kids back for pakikipamuhay, for heritage trips, for volunteer rotations at rural health clinics — all of us — have a problem the U.S. embassy cannot solve from Manila.

BAYAN USA’s closing demands in its April 24 statement were directed at the U.S. government as much as the Philippine one: an independent investigation, full access for families and their lawyers to the remains, and an end to U.S. military funding that underwrites the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Those are political demands that reasonable Filipino Americans will accept, reject, or modify according to their own views. The demand embedded under them — that a kababayan who goes home should come back alive — is one this publication believes every Fil-Am household, regardless of politics, can make its own.

The Weight of Pakikipamuhay

There is a line that has been repeated at Filipino student rallies and kitchen tables on both sides of the Pacific since the 1970s: Mag-aral, maglingkod, mangahas na makibaka — study, serve, dare to struggle. It is the three-word curriculum of the League of Filipino Students. Alyssa Alano would have known it. RJ Nichole Ledesma would have known it. Lyle Prijoles would have known it — he helped bring its English-language version to U.S. Filipino American student life.

The first two verbs are uncontroversial. Every parent wants their child to study. Every Filipino family, here and in the Philippines, carries service in its marrow — through nursing, through military veterans, through balikbayan boxes, through the relentless remittance economy that keeps whole barangays alive. It is the third verb that the state is now contesting. To makibaka, to struggle, is no longer — in the NTF-ELCAC’s framing — a democratic practice. It is the front end of terrorism. It is a process, they say, to be disrupted.

The weight of pakikipamuhay as a word is the weight of that contested third verb. When Filipino Americans send their children back to the Philippines on Baliksambayanan trips, or cultural exchanges, or volunteer rotations — and five million Filipinos in the United States send their children back constantly — they are sending them into a country where the line between learning and subversion is drawn, increasingly, by the Armed Forces of the Philippines rather than by the constitution. That is the change to absorb. That is what Toboso tells us. It is not that some Fil-Ams will now be afraid to go home; most will still go. It is that going home has become, at the margin, a political act whether the traveler intends it as one or not.

Lyle Prijoles went home. He is not coming back.

“No Filipino abroad who wants to return home to our motherland and stand with the most marginalized in society should have to fear government attack.”

— BAYAN USA, April 24, 2026

Final Thoughts: A Question, Not Yet an Answer

Was Toboso a massacre or a legitimate encounter? PinoyBuilt does not have the standing to adjudicate that question today. The Commission on Human Rights is investigating. The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines is monitoring. The families of eight unidentified victims are still traveling to claim remains from police refrigerators in Bacolod. Independent forensic reviews have not been conducted. The NPA’s claim — that a small squad led by Fabillar was present but most of the dead were not combatants — has the shape of a verifiable hypothesis but has not yet been verified. The AFP’s claim — that nineteen New People’s Army members were neutralized in a lawful operation — has, at minimum, the burden of explaining the deaths of Alano, Ledesma, Santuyo, Blanco, Wendel, and Prijoles in terms that match their publicly documented lives.

What PinoyBuilt can say today is narrower. Five facts stand, regardless of which account ultimately prevails.

First: nineteen people died. Second: among them was an American citizen who had returned to his country of origin to do work that generations of his student organization, his academic department, and his wider community consider legitimate and even honorable. Third: the Philippine government’s current framework, embodied in NTF-ELCAC, no longer considers such work legitimate. Fourth: the diaspora organizations that form the backbone of Filipino American civic life — BAYAN USA, Malaya Movement USA, ICHRP, the League of Filipino Students at SFSU, Anakbayan chapters from Seattle to New Jersey — are mobilizing, and their demands have reached the U.S. government. Fifth: the Commission on Human Rights has not yet spoken. Until it does, the question in our headline remains open.

A granddaughter reading this in 2070 may find one of these five facts harder to absorb than the others. It will not be the body count. Body counts, sadly, abound. It will be the word pakikipamuhay. She will want to know why the country of her grandfather’s birth decided, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, that living with farmers was a rebellious act. That is the question this article leaves her. We do not know the answer yet either.

What we know is the name of one of the dead. Lyle Prijoles. From California. Forty years old. Went home.

Sources

• BAYAN USA — “Justice for Lyle Prijoles! Justice for the victims of the Toboso massacre! Defend Negros!” (April 24, 2026)
• BAYAN USA — “Filipinos overseas demand justice for Student leader Alyssa Alano and people’s journalist RJ Ledesma among the 19 killed in Negros by the Philippine military” (April 22, 2026)
• Malaya Movement USA — “DEFEND NEGROS ISLAND! JUSTICE FOR THE NEGROS 19!” (April 23, 2026)
• Philippine Daily Inquirer — “NPA leader, 18 other rebels slain in Negros” (April 21, 2026); “Army: NPA leadership in Negros wiped out” (April 22, 2026); “PNP names 6 of 19 fatalities in Negros Occidental clash” (April 23, 2026); “UP student, journalist killed in clashes” (April 24, 2026); “Military: Detained suspected NPA rebels clashed with soldiers in Negros” (April 24, 2026)
• Rappler — “‘Painful shared reality’: The killing of 19 suspected rebels in Negros Occidental” (April 21, 2026)
• Philstar — “NPA leader, 18 others killed in Negros gunfight” (April 21, 2026); “Rights groups on Negros killings: Possibility of a massacre should be investigated” (April 23, 2026)
• GMA News — “PH Army: 19 alleged NPAs killed, 1 soldier hurt in Negros clash” (April 20, 2026); “UP student among those killed in Negros Occidental ‘clash’” (April 22, 2026); “Who is Alyssa Alano, the UP student leader killed in Negros clash?” (April 23, 2026)
• SunStar Cebu — “Teacher from Cebu among 19 killed in Negros clash” (April 23, 2026)
• Visayan Daily Star — “Army rejects reports of civilian deaths in Toboso clash” (April 23, 2026)
• Armed Forces of the Philippines — Official Statement on the Armed Encounter in Toboso, Negros Occidental (April 23, 2026)
• Philippine News Agency — “Army: No truth to claims civilians killed in NegOcc clash” (April 23, 2026)
• Anakbayan San Diego / Anakbayan New Jersey — Archives of Anakbayan-USA Founding Congress, Chicago, May 18, 2012
• League of Filipino Students at San Francisco State University (lfssfsu.wordpress.com) — Chapter history and mission
• San Francisco State University, School of Asian American Studies — Student Organizations
• Karapatan — Statements on Roel/Ruel Sabillo and Negros human rights incidents (2018–2026)
• Commission on Human Rights — Negros Island Region (ongoing investigation, April 2026)

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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.

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